Voices above the chaos: female war poets from theMiddle East

The carnage in Turkey and Syria has led to a blossoming of poetry with women at the forefront. Here, two of them tell their stories

The Syrian city of Aleppo crumbles into rubble, assailed by Russian bombs, government artillery and chemical weapons. In the heat of battle, Turkish troops and Kurdish fighters turn on one another, fighting their age-old war, though both are supposed to be fighting a common enemy, Islamic State (Isis), advancing on the battered, tortured civilians of Aleppo and other Syrian and Kurdish communities in a murderous pincer movement.

So the Middle East continues to implode but amid the chaos emerges a further force, perhaps incredibly, a poetic and literary one. It comes in defiant journalism, like the story televised last week of a gardener in Aleppo who was killed by bombs while tending his roses and his son, who helped him, orphaned.

And it comes in the verses of two female poets, part of an emergent school of verse, much of it written by women: Bejan Matur and Maram al-Masri Kurdish and Syrian respectively. Matur and Masri are the two most illustrious and cogent of this new generation of female poets; their verse combines to create a devastating but richly composed verbal landscape that it is at once epic and intensely human. Raw and lyrical, of the moment but seeped in the memories of their people, immediate and for ever.

The two women write very differently. Masris poetry vividly encapsulates the frailty of our human condition in a brutal society. It can flay you at first reading. It is fair to see Masri as a love poet whose verse spares no truth of loves joys and mercilessness, to whose work war then came, as it tore her native Syria apart, and overwhelmed it, and her.

Maturs verse is more mystical: it sublimates the political and politicises the sublime; it locates her peoples wandering within a philosophical meditation on both the meaning and emptiness of being. While Masris verse is modern, and modern war poetry of the cruellest order, Maturs evokes the Romantics, Coleridge and Emily Bront. Both record, with power and sentient humanity, the vortex of war in our world today, and the millions these wars scatter and shatter across it, not least to Europes shores.

For me, only through writing poetry can I reach my own horizons, says Matur. Were talking in a cafe by the river Lee in Cork, after a discussion of her work in the city library. During the discussion, she had confronted the fact that all her poetry until now was written in Turkish, rather than her native Kurdish, the banned, therefore private language of home and family.

But in the library, she had read aloud her first Kurdish poems. My mother corrected me, she told the audience. She pointed out, for instance, the different Kurdish words for to turn around and to return I had used the wrong one. So there was my mother, who cannot read, becoming my editor!

Now Matur reflects on these origins. We lived a happy life, but it was always confined; even as a child I was aware of this. Im Kurdish, and you learn early that others do not regard or accept the land in which you are born as your own.

Now, repression in the wake of the failed coup against Turkeys President Erdoan moves against all Alevi Kurds, like Maturs family seen not only as enemies of the state, but also as heretics by its aggressive Islamicisation. No one feels safe, she says, as pro-regime mobs stage incursions into Kurdish communities.

Matur was born in 1968, in the ancient Hittite city of Mara, in Turkeys south-eastern corner, Iraq to the south, Iran to the east. I was a bookish little girl, she says.

Her student days in the late 1980s were dominated by Saddam Husseins persecution and gassing of Maturs fellow Kurds across the border in Iraq, and Turkeys less dramatic but unrelenting persecution of Kurdishness, let alone its political expression. And so my idea, my notion, of being Kurdish became more fundamental to me. As a law student in Ankara Kurdish students were suspected, and arrested for their activities, and I was one of them.

Matur, arrested and jailed for 12 months in 1988-9, explains how she began writing poems in prison. She recently went to a family wedding in Switzerland, at which she met her parents and relatives and friends she had not seen since childhood, such is diaspora life. At the wedding, my father and I were trying to calculate how long I had been held in solitary confinement during my detention, she says. I thought it was for 18 days; my father corrected me it had been 28. And that was very strange for me, because there was no way of knowing. I was held in total darkness, alone a place in which there was no time. It was up to those outside, my father, to count the days.

I have travelled like a nomad, she says. but when I return to my village and sit with my mother, I am back among my people. I want to say: we are not invisible, as Turkey says we are. We have a culture, we have a language, and we want to be seen. What I try to understand is the meaning of our existence, and if you do that, you take a political position, you state an act of resistance.

After her ordeal at the hands of the Turkish regime, and now renewed threats to her friends and colleagues, Matur seeks to establish herself in the UK, where she has family. Some months after our meeting in Ireland, walking in Kenwood, London, she says: The moment you fight against the terrible order of things on its own terms, you join it. You have to find another way, and poetry is about finding another way.